Hello Johannes, Thursday, January 7, 2010, 3:32:03 PM, you wrote:
"the existence (or: need for) a preprocessor shows omissions in (the design of) a language."
yes, that's the common opinion. the same true for comments and identifiers :D shortly speaking, preprocessor is just another language on top of our one that has poor integration with main language. this partly solved by so-called syntactical preprocessors and even typeful ones (like Template Haskell) otoh there is no perfect language that is able to express any constraint. so preprocessor, applied to any given language, provides us additional level of expressiveness. so when you have some concrete problem that may be expressed in A only with preprocessor and in B as is - B is definitely better. if you typically write your programs in C++ w/o using preprocessor, and in C - with it, C++ is better. but when your programming level increases, you may go higher expressiveness of language you are using and start to need use of additional preprocessors. so if some language Pascal typically used without preprocessor and some language C - with it, it may just mean that C users are much more experienced and need more expressive power than Pascal ones -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com